The price of electronic devices has continued to decrease dramatically. In addition, the types of consumer electronic components that can be purchased have continued to increase. For example, DVD players, large screen TVs, multi-carousel CD and DVD players, MP3 players, video game consoles, and similar consumer electronic items have become more widely available while continuing to drop in price.
The decreasing prices and increasing types of consumer electronic components have resulted in today's homes and businesses being filled with modern conveniences. Yet, as these conveniences grow in number and sophistication, they also become more difficult to manage and control. Typical homes and businesses include a number of televisions, computer monitors and/or screens of some kind for viewing various kinds of visual items.
Like other types of electronic devices, video cameras, including web cams and surveillance cameras, have continued to decrease in price. As a result, video cameras are more widely used than ever before. Many homes and businesses now include a number of video cameras to monitor activity. These video cameras can monitor a wide range of activity that previously could not be reviewed and analyzed.
Unfortunately, the information produced by the video cameras can be so voluminous that it is difficult to sort through and identify that which is meaningful. In many cases, it would be impossible, or virtually impossible, to review all of the video generated by these systems. Consider, for example, a home with six video cameras running 24 hours a day. Each day over 144 hours of video are generated. Even if this video is reviewed at four times its normal speed, it would require 36 hours to review all the video. It would require a team of four people working nine hours a day to review the video produced by this simple system.
Accordingly, a system and method for identifying meaningful aspects of generated video streams is desirable.